time. If we
are to perform the duty of examining them we have first of all to draw
them forth, to disengage them from our inherited tangle of beliefs and
frame them in suitable words; we have next to bring ourselves to realize
vividly and keenly that the conceptions, thus disentangled and framed, are
in fact, whether they be true or false, at the very heart of the social
philosophy of the world; we have in the third place to detect the
fundamental character of the blunder involved in them--to see clearly and
coldly wherein they are wrong and why they are ruinous; we have, finally,
to trace, if we can, their deadly effects both in the course of human
history and in the present status of our human world.

The task of disengaging the two monstrous misconceptions from the tangled
skein of inherited beliefs and framing them in words, I have already
repeatedly performed. Let us keep the results in mind. Here they are in
their nakedness: (1) Human beings--men, women, and children--are animals
(and so they are natural): (2) human beings are neither natural nor
_super_natural, neither wholly animal nor wholly "divine," but are _both_
natural and _super_natural _at once_--a sort of mysterious hybrid compound
of brute and gods.

The second part of our task--which is the reader's task as much as mine--is
not so easy; and the reason is evident. It is this: The false creeds in
question--the fatal misconceptions they involve--are so _familiar_ to
us--they have been so long and so deeply imbedded in our thought and speech
and ways of life--we have been so thoroughly _bred_ in them by home and
school and church and state--that we _habitually_ and _unconsciously_ take
them for granted and have to be virtually _stung_ into an awareness of the
fact that we do actually hold them and that they do actually reign to-day
throughout the world and have so reigned from time immemorial. We have,
therefore, to shake ourselves awake, to _prick_ ourselves into a
realization of the truth.

I assume that the reader is at once hard-headed, rational, I mean, and
interested in the welfare of mankind. If he is not, he will not be a
"reader" of this book. He, therefore, knows that the third task--the task
of detecting and exposing the fundamental error of the misconceptions in
question--is a task of the utmost importance. What is that error? It is, I
have said, an error in logic. But logical errors are not all alike--they
are of many kinds. What is the "k